Twitter for iOS Updated With New $8 Subscription Offering Verification and More [Updated: Not Yet Live]

[tufapshakur]

If enough people do sign up and toggle verified only in their feeds/comments, a lot of Twitter problems will go away for those who are most passionate about the platform. The trolls, bots and freeloaders will be living in their own toxic Twitter universe.

 

[mantan]

Twitter is a private company now. Hilarious watching this thread and reading comments on what Elon should do, shouldn’t do, couldn’t do, wouldn’t do, etc. 😂.

I want less, ads, more ads, no ads!

Hilarious. Nobody cares if you used twitter, didn’t use it, quit because of Elon, been sober for x years from twitter. Buy the company and then do what you’d like with it. Lol.

If Twitter was furniture, automobile or aluminum siding company, I would totally agree. Social media companies play a different role. There is arguably no more powerful medium for shaping and informing the public.

We live in an increasingly segmented society. People receive information through very carefully designed algorithms that wrap themselves in the warm blanket of confirmation bias. It's critical that at a minimum social media companies do what they can to manage disinformation.

We've relied on capitalism to provide guardrails with mixed results. The privacy issue got way out of hand before most people even realized how much of their data was curated and shared. Twitter relies on advertisers thinking it's a somewhat trusted medium to want to put their companies name on it.

I wish I had the privilege in life to be 'oh well, lulz' about what happens on Twitter. But seeing what social media has done to the country and the world, I'm concerned.

No matter what the outcome is on Twitter, we're all going to see the full effects of the recent changes cause all sorts of chaos.

 

[segfaultdotorg]

"Twitter for iOS..."
Which iOS? iPhoneOS or iPadOS?

 

[Abazigal]

Why so much coverage of Twitter on this site?

Because that’s what readers want apparently.

To me, the only thing even remotely connected to Apple is that they will be taking $2.40 a month off every iOS subscriber this way. I wonder what Elon will have to say about that.

 

[Macalway]

I've never tweeted.

I know.....

 

[ikramerica]

What's funny is Musk loyalists think he's doing something righteous and bold by opening the blue check to all. But it makes the blue check completely worthless and instead of representing that a person is an expert or figure of knowledge or importance, all a blue checkmark now symbolizes is Musk duped you into spending $8 a month because you are vain.

The Twitter blue check has no value or meaning anymore, thus no status. It's literally worthless now. But Musk fans will now pay him $8 a month for some blue pixels. lol it's insane

Blue Check was always worthless.

 

[ikramerica]

He’s certainly a hypocrite he brags about protecting the environment yet his Telsa batteries are destroying the environment because of heavy lithium mining.

View attachment 2108650

If that wasn’t manmade it would be a natural wonder. Really interesting looking…

 

[Jumpthesnark]

...despite the app update, the new Twitter Blue plan is not yet live and Twitter is doing "real-time" testing.

So I don't even have to update the app for my blue checkmark to disappear, it'll do it on its own? What great news.

 

[Seend1983]

So, who's excited for yet another recurring entry on your monthly bill?!?!

 

[ikramerica]

How would you know this? LOL

They couldn’t competently run Twitter with the current workforce either.

Headcount doesn’t equate to competency. If it did, government agencies would be the most competently run of any organization.

 

[EdT]

By the time I saw this it was already up to 10 pages. I don’t think it had been posted for very long when I first looked, but I intentionally didn’t read anything past the first 2 or 3 comments. I’m going to assume a dumpster fire of a comment section and just say “good night all”.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Shouldnt “verified” mean a twitter user has been confirmed to be a real person and they are why claim to be? At what point in the plague of humanity that is twitter did it become “a person whose opinion is more important than yours”?

From the beginning? Can a bot be 'verified'? If so, it's all just meaningless, which it all is anyway. I knew people that were so involved in their social media. Had to interact constantly (sounds like me and here. I must need a new hobby).

Also 'someone is wrong on the internet and I have to correct them'? Tribalism? Being 'verified' puts you into a different 'tribe', a superset of the standard nobodies. *shrug* It's all BS.

 

[rafark]

Twitter users in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

No South Africa? Shame on him

 

[Gasu E.]

When it goes live. Hopefully, no one is going to pay $8. That $8 subscription still doesn’t eliminate dealing with the bots.

It actually makes it more likely that you will see certain kinds of bots. Before, verified accounts were hand-curated. With this new system, I really don't think it's going to be a problem for Russia to come up with $8K/month to fund a thousand "verified" fake accounts.

 

[bobcomer]

Explain how it’s “easy”. And please provide sources to back up that claim.

It's been discussed here already. Seems like a credit card and a name to match is all you need from what has been said.

Public figures, like Tim Cook, will reportedly have their title listed under their user name (Apple CEO). That will distinguish him from other Tim Cooks, who can also not use the Apple CEO’s picture in their profile, as that is a violation of TOS.

I actually haven't seen any proof that that is part of the verification anymore, but whatever. I think we'll just have to wait and see.. I certainly don't have any inside knowledge and I don't even like twitter, or Musk! (and I do have a twitter account, but no check before and none in the future)

You guys are making this way more complicated than it needs to be. It’s fairly simple and straight forward.

Well, set us straight, with proof to back it up.

 

[pcmike]

Not even a verification process behind it? What if I rename my Twitter to Angela. Merkel? People are stupid, I am sure there would be heaps of people falling for trolls

You're missing the big picture.. today it's blue checks for everyone.. tomorrow it's gold checks for the previous blue check people.. except it will be far more than $8/month and it'll be a far more rigorous verification process.. come one now..

 

[Gasu E.]

Tbf, he only needs about 3,5% of users to pay for that blue check mark for him to get that $1B/y.

Yeah, basically that's like being able to cover the monthly mortgage payments; even though the value of your house is now less than your mortgage debt.

 

[Mrkevinfinnerty]

Twitter needs more people than WhatsApp because it does way more things than WhatsApp.

There's no json/XML 'feed' in WhatsApp. No one can just start following someone on WhatsApp to see all their messages in their feed. It doesn't work like that. I don't see every message my brother sends to his wife via WhatsApp even though I have separate chats with both hime and her. WhatsApp and Twitter are entirely different things. Twitter is far more complex. Why am I having to explain this to you?

In Twitter you have a feed, and you choose who can post into that feed. WhatsApp is a messaging service with chats that you actively have to be in for you to see information. Musk has 114,400,000 followers on Twitter. You think 114,400,000 people would be in a chat group on WhatsApp to see what he messages? How about Barack Obama? He has 133,300,000 followers on Twitter. How would I see both Musk's and Obama's messages in one chat unless they were both in it? WhatsApp is not Twitter, and to compare their headcount is just wrong, sorry.

You're comparing a store that sells fruit & veg to a supermarket that sells fruit & veg, dairy, frozen food, toys, garden furniture, power tools...

Dear me, long tedious posts about the obvious differences between the platforms does change the fact that Twitter is enormously overstaffed, i'm not sure why you need to keep having that explained to you? The company is a complete mess.

They currently have more employees than Instagram, Whatsapp and Snapchat combined. All three have far more active users than Twitter.

500 people running Instagram but you can't run Twitter on 3000!?

 

[Gasu E.]

That’s weird Twitter seems to be running just fine.

To be accurate, you can't run a software company LONG TERM with 50% too few people. Sure, you don't need all that staff just to keep the servers up and running for a short time. But you need lots of developers just to keep the software compatible with all the changes that happen in the rest of the computing environment. You need to add new features to keep up with the competition, as it evolves, and to keep differentiating the product.

 

[Mrkevinfinnerty]

To be accurate, you can't run a software company LONG TERM with 50% too few people. Sure, you don't need all that staff just to keep the servers up and running for a short time. But you need lots of developers just to keep the software compatible with all the changes that happen in the rest of the computing environment. You need to add new features to keep up with the competition, as it evolves, and to keep differentiating the product.

It isn't 50% too few. They are massively overstaffed.

 

[Gasu E.]

500 people running Instagram but you can't run Twitter on 3000!?

I'll bet they could, if it were the right 3000 people. But do you actually believe, that after just one week, Musk has figured out which were the "right" 3000 people?

Let me tell you something else. I've worked in tech companies. The best employees have lots of alternative job opportunities. And when they see their fellow employees treated, as they see it, poorly, they can't help but imagine they will be next. I would bet any amount of money that, of those 3000, the top 1000 are going to be out looking.

 

[TallManNY]

To be accurate, you can't run a software company LONG TERM with 50% too few people. Sure, you don't need all that staff just to keep the servers up and running for a short time. But you need lots of developers just to keep the software compatible with all the changes that happen in the rest of the computing environment. You need to add new features to keep up with the competition, as it evolves, and to keep differentiating the product.

Uhm, lots of developers, like 500 full time developers? Or like 2,000 full time developers? Because that is what we are talking about here. Or do you think it takes 2,000 people to sell the ads that generate the revenue? Because I know folks who run their own blog and sell ads and it takes, literally, minutes per month.

In addition, Twitter had like 3,300 employees in 2017. In 2020 they were at 5,500 employees and folks in the industry thought that was overstaffed.

 

[Gasu E.]

It isn't 50% too few. They are massively overstaffed.

I'm not going to insult your intelligence by asking "how do you know?" I'm going to respect you by stating outright that you have no way to know this.

 

[GoetzPhil]

If you just wasted 55 Billions and urgendtly need money... LOL

I still dont use Twitter and why the heck should I pay money for something my friends already know? That I AM ME ... LOL

 

[rols]

The best possible outcome is that Twitter dies. I thought that Elon subconsciously bought it to kill it. If so, he will be canonized as a saint by normal people everywhere.

however it'll be replaced by something just as useless